Tom Wolfe called the 1980s 'the Me Decade', a time when everyone, with Steven Spielberg in the lead, was searching for their inner child. Tim Burton put a spoke into the wheel of this adolescent cycle with his 1989 Batman, which insisted that we abandon the foetal attraction of that hidden infant and go in search of our dark sides.

In so doing, he took us back to the cruel spirit of the strip cartoon Bob Kane, created in the late 1930s. This was before Susan Sontag's seminal 1964 essay 'Notes on Camp' helped create a vogue for kitsch and the cult of 'It's good because it's bad', which was consciously adopted by the 1966 TV series featuring Adam West as Batman.

Burton's two Batman films were followed by a pair directed by former window dresser Joel Schumacher that returned the franchise to the camp Sixties. Now, Christopher Nolan, one of the truly exciting British directors to have emerged in the past decade, has been engaged to restore some depth and dignity. His Batman Begins, scripted in collaboration with David S Goyer, takes the caped crusader back to his origins.

The first episode of Bob Kane's comic-strip for the May 1939 Detective Comics was headed 'The legend of the Batman - who he is and how he came to be!' In 12 frames, he explained how Bruce Wayne grew up to adopt the guise of Batman, brooding over Gotham City as the implacable nemesis of the underworld.

As Kane tells it, the pre-teen Bruce is out at night (circa 1924) with his parents when an armed mugger kills both of them. The orphaned lad, his hands clasped in prayer, his bedroom illuminated by a single candle, swears 'to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals'. He 'becomes a master scientist' and 'trains his body to physical perfection' and, because 'criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot', chooses to become 'a creature of the night, black, terrible... a bat... the Batman'. From these two garishly printed pages, Nolan and Goyer have fashioned a whole movie.

To a narrative that itself draws on a tradition of avenger heroes in foppish disguise stemming from Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel, they have added elements from sources ancient and modern, among them Fritz Lang's expressionist thrillers, Da Vinci Code conspiracies, kung fu flicks and Bond movies.

More important, in tracing Bruce Wayne's progress from troubled youth to confident adult, they have employed the disruption of time and linear narrative that gave such distinction to Nolan's shoestring Following, and its low-budget follow-up, the masterly Memento. In both those movies, the elliptical style drew us into the mind of a troubled protagonist; here, the brilliant but not flamboyant editing involves us in the divided consciousness of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale).

The primary strand centres on Bruce's journeying in the east, where his attempts to understand the criminal mind have led to his incarceration in a Chinese gulag. From this dread place, he's plucked by a mysterious stranger (Liam Neeson) who dispatches him on a quest to the Himalayas. At a remote, vertiginously located monastery, he receives the spiritual and physical instruction that will make him a member of a clandestine ninja-style elite called the League of Shadows.

The secondary narrative is a succession of flashbacks, recounting his childhood, the murder of his wealthy parents, his decision to drop out of Princeton and his departure from Gotham, disgusted by its corruption. From these flashbacks emerges his secret fear: he fell into a bats' nest as a boy, so bats became for him what rats were for Winston Smith and snakes for Indiana Jones. We also learn of his lifelong love for the upright Rachel (Katie Holmes), the guilt he feels for his parents' death and the agitation produced by his thoughts of revenge.

These problems are dramatically resolved when he comes to see that the League of Shadows, despite its 2,000-year history, is a band of fascistic vigilantes. He returns to Gotham to shape his new identity by turning his greatest fear into a weapon against crime as he decides to follow an age-old family tradition of public service. Apart from comic interventions from Alfred (Michael Caine), the family's devoted English butler and guardian of Wayne Manor, the early part of Batman Begins is an earnest, not to say solemn affair.

It becomes more playful thereafter as Bruce prepares to confront two groups of opponents - on one hand, the sinister CEO of Wayne Enterprises (Rutger Hauer), and, on the other, a sadistic underworld boss (Tom Wilkinson) and a mad psychiatrist (Cillian Murphy) with a private asylum, who are terrorising Gotham. A major ingredient here is a delightful, extremely funny performance from Morgan Freeman as the maverick head of the special ordnance branch of Wayne Enterprises, a version of James Bond's Q. He provides Bruce with a lethal armoury, equipment for scaling skyscrapers and, of course, the Batmobile, most of it commissioned by the Pentagon but rejected as too expensive for everyday use.

Christian Bale is persuasively melancholy but less gloomily brooding than Michael Keaton, a sturdier figure than George Clooney and Val Kilmer, and more likable than any of them. He doesn't manage his character's playboy persona as easily as Leslie Howard does in The Scarlet Pimpernel or Pimpernel Smith, but that may be part of the joke.

Anyway, this is an enjoyable, sophisticated film with a largely British cast and mostly made in this country. Amusingly, the Joker presents his calling card in the final minute, seemingly announcing a sequel. But no one would be foolish enough to compete with Jack Nicholson's 1989 Joker, so perhaps Nolan is saying that Batman Begins already has a sequel - Tim Burton's Batman - and that he himself is moving on to pictures new.